


Laser Striped

by tanarill



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-02-21
Updated: 2007-02-21
Packaged: 2019-02-09 10:12:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12885663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanarill/pseuds/tanarill
Summary: Today I learned I have 18 days to find a new place to live and move there. I was unutterably miserable. Now I'm only sort of miserable; I have good friends who are helping.This is more stress I didn't need and don't have time for.





	Laser Striped

It’s very hard to draw with light.

Drawing with dark is much easier; dark is the addition of absence, while light is the absence of absorption. Covering a sheet of paper with a few places that don’t reflect is far easier than giving an absorbent area the ability to reflect. But if you do figure out how to do it–not merely cover up the dark, but _uncover_ the light–it’s worth the effort.

People who can draw with light are not limited in their art.

A cloudbank, and plastic bag, and a laser pointer. A balloon and the wind. A word, a motion, a thing of grace and of beauty. The uncovering of a leaf that’s not really a leaf anymore, as the mesophyll has dissolved and left only the bundles of phloem and xylem behind.

The uncovering of _anything_ , of _everything_ that you should have seen but didn’t.

It’s easy to draw with dark–easy to cover up what’s there with splotches of absorbence and reflectance. But the true artist is one who can draw out the light, blend it, bend it like the multifaceted gem plumage of a hummingbird, which is all just beads of air in any case, and send it back multiplied and magnified far beyond that which there was in the beginning.

It’s very hard to draw, with light.

**Author's Note:**

> Today I learned I have 18 days to find a new place to live and move there. I was unutterably miserable. Now I'm only sort of miserable; I have good friends who are helping.
> 
> This is more stress I didn't need and don't have time for.


End file.
